


Requiēscat

by hitlikehammers



Series: Risorgimento [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dream Sharing, Emotional Instability, Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Man Out of Time, Or Ice-Crossed Love Really, Or Time-Crossed Love, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Star-crossed love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 03:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4813799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve doesn’t dream, anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Requiēscat

**Author's Note:**

> So _finally_ I am on the road to finishing this story/series—the next bit is written, but both myself and my lovely beta (the long-suffering [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad)) agreed there needed to be a bridge between the first part and the new one. Here is said bridge. 
> 
> Yay dream-sharing?

Steve doesn’t dream, anymore. 

After the ice, he lets the images, the horror, the ways he cannot _reach_ , the ways he cannot fix and touch and hold and save—he lets them wake him once. Just once.

Once is enough. More than.

So he goes to the heavy bang, and he lets the sand seep out of cracks that he makes, that he draws and controls and decides when the cracks in his own self are beyond his control. 

He trains himself to operate on the bare minimum of physical rest: the serum helps. He avoids REM sleep like the plague, like the first frost and the wind that rode it back when his lungs would tremble before even his limbs in the cold—back when Bucky would wrap around him and breathe with the only aim to show him how and Steve isn’t just running from the blood and the loss and the way he fails where it shows behind his eyes, he’s not just running from the way it’ll return and churn in his gut: no.

No, he’s running because he let it kill him all over again one time, one time.

One time, he let himself dream, and it was more than a nightmare.

One time, he let himself drift, and there was no ice. There was no space. There was no subtle trickle of taunting light from nowhere, illuminating the only rising-falling chest that’d ever mattered; the only face Steve ever wanted to see.

Because there was no _Bucky_.

And Steve doesn’t know what it was, for all that Bucky asked him if it was real, if it was truth: Steve doesn’t know if it was in his head or in his heart or somewhere between two of both, his and Bucky’s alike that needed so damn bad they couldn’t stand: but Bucky’s gone.

Bucky’s gone, and this world is different, and Steve hadn’t even bothered to visit the base of a cliff and see the blood that proved it for himself, and so he deserves this.

He deserves to suffer.

And he doesn’t know what hurts more, what takes him apart more mercilessly: the loss in the first place, in its point-of-fact, or the idea that maybe there is somewhere, liminal and dashed in some periphery of existence but so real, so _real_ for all that reality was relative—if there is some place where Steve had left Bucky behind, left Bucky alone as Bucky’d left Steve against his will, against both their hearts and Steve had died all over again, every time, and fuck, _fuck_.

And Steve doesn’t dream, anymore. He doesn’t have to.

 _This_ is the nightmare.  


 

___________________________________________________

 

When it happens, Steve thinks, maybe it all makes sense.

Because Steve hasn’t dreamt is so very, very, long, and he wonders if this is his other place, his waking nightmare: he doesn’t remember everything from the ice within the ice, the haven within the prison where Bucky’s touch was warm; he doesn’t remember everything, but he remembers losing, remembers waking with Bucky missing and then raging, sobbing, breaking until he returned, until Steve had to shore up his own cracks and fault-lines because Bucky came back tattered every time and Steve had to be his anchor, had to be enough if not to keep him, then to keep him coming _back_.

And maybe this is Steve’s hell on the other side: maybe, because Steve was never able to make it back to that other world, that other place, their own afterlife bathed in cold but wrapped up in such _feeling_ , with such _love_ and all the things unsaid, and they’d spoke of dinner, of a date, of a _ring_ —

Watching that mask come off is the flicker, the flashing of light against the translucent cold, the imminent warning of danger and darkness and loss much like death when Bucky faded from his arms and left Steve’s heart to eat itself alive. Watching that face watch _him_ without so much as a flicker of recognition is soul-shattering, and Steve remembers flashes, Steve remembers words, and it was a dream, a hallucination, the last gasps of life before death but Steve remembers what Bucky said they made him into.

Steve remembers what Bucky said they made him do.

 _Monster_.

And maybe this is Steve’s hell, then. Maybe this is where Steve goes when Bucky is gone, because Steve was selfish, and Steve begged the better half of his being to give in; asked Bucky to do the unspeakable, to be small and silent and to hide away, to be less when he was more, when he was all, when he was every goddamn thing and Steve is a coward, Steve is weak and he cannot help but to fail, over and again, and dear god, this is his hell.

To watch that face made of blankness, is hell.

To aim a gun at that body made of kevlar and pain, is hell.

To shoot at all, even if he balks before pulling the trigger and hits wide: that is hell.

To drop his shield, lighter than his heart as it pounds, as it breaks somehow when already broken; to fall prone beneath that body and not recognize it one bit, to feel it pressed into him with rage and with hate when all it ever touched him with was _love_ , good god.

This is _hell_.

He understands, now, why Bucky came back so shaken. Why Bucky feared so deep. If these were the kinds of horrors, if Bucky ever had to stare down _his_ heart, _his_ world, his reason for fucking _being_ on a trembling plane, on the last foothold before falling, staring down an iron fist and hateful eyes and knowing it'll be over long after you can stand it, or survive: if this was where Bucky went, then Steve should have fought harder, should have sworn vengeance to every god and devil and held to Bucky, burrowed into him, taken Bucky into himself and screamed at life, at death, at dreaming and wanting—whatever it was—that taking one meant taking both. 

Bucky's face is foreign; is intimately woven in Stevie's chest, inside the heart that wants to give, but can't, because the floor, the bars, the grating beneath them gives first: the end of the line, and here is the nightmare; _this_ is the nightmare. 

This is the nightmare.

He’s ready for it to end.

He’s ready.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr.](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com)


End file.
